Текст книги "The Angels Weep"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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"Why does he call you Bugsy?" Craig had to raise his voice above the engine noise.

"I'm an entomologist," she shouted back. "You know, bugs and things." "Where do you work?" The cool evening air flattened her blouse against her chest, and she was very obviously not wearing a bra.

She had small finely shaped breasts and the cold made her nipples stand out in little dark lumps under the thin cloth. It was difficult not to gawk.

"At the museum. Did you know that we have the finest collection of tropical and sub-tropical insects in existence, better than the Smithsonian or the Kensington Natural History Museum?" "Bully for you."

"Sorry, I can be a bore." "Never." She smiled her thanks, but changed the subject. "How long have you known Roland?" "Twenty-nine years."

"How old are you?" "Twenty-nine." "Tell me about him." "What's to tell about somebody who is perfect?" "Try to think of something," she encouraged him.

"Head boy at Michaelhouse. Captain of rugger and cricket. Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, Oriel scholar. Blues for rowing and cricket, half-blue for tennis, colonel in the Scouts, silver cross for valour, heir to twenty-million-plus dollars. You know, all the usual things."

Craig shrugged.

"You don't like him, "she accused.

"I love him, "he said. "In a funny sort of way." "You don't want to talk about him any more?" "I'd rather talk about you." "That suits me, what do you want to know?" He wanted to make her smile again.

"Start at the time you were born and don't. miss anything out." "I was born in a little village in Yorkshire, my daddy is the local veterinarian." "When? I said not to miss anything." She slanted her eyes mischievously. "What is the local expression for an indeterminate date some time before the rinderpest?" "that was in the 1890s."

"Okay," she smiled again. "I was born some time after the rinderpest."

It was working, Craig realized. She liked him. She smiled more readily, and their banter was light and easy. Perhaps it was just wistful imagination, but he thought he detected the first sexual awareness in her manner, the way she held her head and moved her body, the way she then abruptly he thought of Roland and felt the cold slide of despair.

Jonathan Ballantyne came out onto the veranda of King's Lynn, took one look at her, and went immediately into his role of the lustful rogue.

He kissed her hand. "You are the prettiest young lady that Craig has ever come up with by a street." Some perverse streak made Craig deny it. "Janine is Roly's friend, Bawu." "Ah," the old man nodded.

"I should have known. Too much class for your taste, boy." Craig's marriage had lasted a little longer than one of his jobs, just over a year, but Bawu had not approved of Craig's choice, had said so before the wedding and after it, before the divorce and after it and at every opportunity since then.

"Thank you, Mr. Ballantyne." Janine slanted her eyes at Jonathan.

"You may call me Bawu. "Jonathan gave her his ultimate accolade, made an arm for her and said, "Come and see my Claymore mines, my dear." Craig watched them go off on a tour of the de fences another sure sign of Bawu's high favour.

"He has three wives buried up on the kopje," Craig muttered ruefully, "and is still as randy as an old goat." Craig woke to his bedroom door cracking back on its hinges, and Jonathan Ballantyne's cry.

"Are you going to sleep all day? It's four-thirty already."

"Just because you haven't slept for twenty years, Bawu." "Enough of your lip, boy today's the big day. Get that pretty little filly of Roland's and we'll all go down to test my secret weapon." "Before breakfast?" Craig protested, but excited as a child invited to a picnic, the old man had gone already.

It was parked at a prudent distance from the nearest building.

The cook had threatened to resign if there were any more experiments conducted within blast range of his kitchen. It stood on the edge of a field of ripening seed maize, and it was surrounded by a small crowd of labourers and tractor drivers and clerks.

"What on earth is it?" Janine puzzled, as they crossed the ploughed land towards it, but before anyone could reply, a figure in greasy blue overalls detached itself from the crowd and hurried towards them.

"Mister Craig, thank goodness you are here. You've got to stop him." "Don't be a blithering old idiot, Okky,"Jonathan ordered. Okky van Rensburg had been chief mechanic on King's Lynn for twenty years.

Behind his back Jonathan boasted that Okky could strip down a John Deere tractor, and build up a Cadillac and two Rolls Royce Silver Clouds out of the spare parts. He was a wiry grease-stained little monkey of a man. He ignored Jonathan's injunction to silence.

"Bawu's going to kill himself, unless somebody stops him." He wrung his scarred blackened hands pitifidly.

But already Jonathan was donning his helmet and fastening the strap under his chin. It was the same tin helmet that he had worn on that day in 1916 that he won his Military Cross, and the dent in the side had been made by a shard of German shrapnel. There was an unholy gleam in his eyes as he advanced upon the monstrous vehicle.

"Okky has converted a three-ton Ford truck," he explained to Janine, "lifted the chassis," as though it were on stilts, the vehicle's body stood high above the huge lugged tyres, "put in deflectors here," he pointed out the heavy steel vee-shaped plates under the cab that would split the blast of a land mine "armoured the cab," the body looked like a tiger tank, with steel hatches, a driver's slit and gun ports for a heavy Browning machine-gun, "but look what we have got on top!" At a glance it could have been mistaken for the conning tower of a nuclear submarine, and Okky was still wringing his hands.

"He's got twenty galvanized steel pipes filled with plastic explosive and thirty pounds of ball-bearings each." "Good Lord, Bawu."

Even Craig was horrified. "The damn things will explode!" "He has set them in blocks of concrete," Okky moaned, "and aimed them out on each side just like the cannons on one of Nelson's ships of the line. Ten on each side." "A twenty-gun Ford," Craig breathed with awe.

"When I run into an ambush, I just press the button and boom, a broadside of three hundred pounds of ball, bearings into the bastards," Jonathan gloated openly. "A whiff of grape, as old Bonaparte said."

"He's going to blow himself to hell,"Okky moaned.

"Oh, do stop being an old woman," Jonathan told him. "And give me a leg up." "Bawu, this time I really do agree with Okky." Craig tried to stop him, but the old man went up the steel ladder with the agility of a vervet monkey, and posed dramatically in the hatchway, like the "commander of a panzer division.

"I'll let off one broadside at a time, the starboard side first."

Then his eyes lit on Janine. "Would you like to be my co-pilot, my dear?" "That is astonishingly civil of you, Bawu, but I think I'll get a better view from the irrigation ditch over there." "Then stand back everyone." Jonathan made a wide imperious gesture of dismissal, and the Matabele labourers and drivers who had been witnesses to. Jonathan's previous test took off like a brigade of Egyptian infantry departing from the Six-day War. Some of them were still running as they crossed the ridge of the kopje.

Okky reached the irrigation ditch half a dozen paces ahead of Craig and Janine, and then the three of them cautiously lifted their heads above the bank. Three hundred yards away, the grotesque Ford stood in monumental isolation in the middle of the ploughed land, and from the hatchway Jonathan gave them a cheery wave, and then disappeared.

They covered their ears with both hands and waited. Nothing happened.

"He's chickened out," Craig said hopefully, and the hatch opened again. Jonathan's helmeted head reappeared, his face red with outrage.

"Okky, you son of a bitch, you disconnected the wiring," he roared. "You are fired, do you hear me? Fired!".

"Third time he has fired me this week," Okky muttered morosely.

"It was the only way I could think of to stop him." "Hold on, my dear," Jonathan addressed himself to Janine. "I'll have it connected up in a jiffy." "Don't worry on my account, Bawu" she yelled back, but he had disappeared again.

The minutes passed, each one a separate eternity, and, their hopes gradually rose again.

"It's not going to work." "Let's get him out of there." "Bawu, we are coming to get you," Craig cupped his hands and bellowed. "And you'd better come quietly." He rose slowly out of the ditch, and at that moment the armoured Ford disappeared in a huge boiling cloud of smoke and dust. A sheet of white flame licked over the field of standing maize, scything it flat as though some monstrous combine-harvester had swept across it, and they were enveloped by such an appalling blast of sound, that Craig lost his balance and fell back into the ditch on top of the other two.

Frantically they scrambled to untangle themselves in the bottom of the ditch, and then looked out fearfully again across the ploughed field. The dreadful silence was broken only by the singing in their own ears, and the dwindling yelps of the old man's pack of savage Rottweilers and Dobermann pinschers as they fled in utter panic back up the road towards the homestead. The field was obscured by a dense curtain of drifting blue smoke and red-brown dust.

They climbed up out of the ditch and stared into the smoke and dust, and the breeze blew it gently aside. The Ford lay upon its back.

All four of its massive lugged tyres were pointing to the heavens as though in abject surrender.

"Bawu!" Craig cried and raced towards it. The gaping mouths of the pipe cannons were still oozing oily wreaths of smoke, but there was no other movement.

Craig wrestled the steel hatch open, and crawled into it on his hands and knees. The dark interior stank of acrid plastic explosive burn. " "Bawu!" He found him crumpled in the bottom of the cab, and he knew instantly that the old man was in extremis. The whole shape of his face had altered, and his voice was an unintelligible blur.

Craig caught him up in his arms and tried to drag him towards the hatch, but the old man fought him off with desperate strength, and at last Craig understood what he was saying.

"My teeth, blown my bloody teeth oud" He was back on his hands and knees searching desperately. "Mustn't let her see me, find them, boy, find them." Craig found the missing plates under the driver's seat, and with them once more in place, Jonathan shot out of the hatchway and confronted Okky van Rensburg furiously.

"You made it top-heavy, you Withering old idiot." "You can't talk to me like that, Bawu, I don't work for you any longer. You fired me."

"You're hired," bellowed Jonathan. "Now get that thing right way up again." Twenty sweating, singing Matabele heaved the Ford slowly upright and at last it flopped over onto its wheels again.

"Looks like a banana," Okky remarked with obvious satisfaction.

"The recoil of your cannons has bent it almost double. You'll never get that chassis straight again." "There is only one way to straighten it," Jonathan announced and began tightening the strap of his tin helmet again.

What are you going to do, Jon-Jon?" Craig demanded anxiously. , "Fire the other broadside, of course," said Jonathan grimly.

"That will knock it straight again." But Craig seized one of his arms, Okky the other, and Janine murmured soothingly to him as they led him away to the waiting Land-Rover.

"Can you imagine Bawu reaching for the cigarette lighter and hitting the wrong button while driving down Main Street," Craig chortled, "and letting that lot go through the front doors of the City Hall?" They giggled over it the whole way back to town, and as they drove in past the lovely lawns of the municipal gardens, Craig suggested easily, "Sunday evening in Bulawayo, you could suffer a nervous breakdown from the mad gaiety of it. Let me cook you one of my famous dinners on the yacht, and save you from it." "The yacht?"Janine was instantly intrigued. "Here? Fifteen hundred miles from the nearest salt water?" "I. will say no more," Craig declared. "Either you come with me, or you will forever be consumed by unsatisfied curiosity." "A fate worse than death," she agreed. "And I have always been a good sailor. Let's go!" Craig took the airport road but before they left the builtup area, he turned into one of the older sections of the town. Between two rundown cottages was an empty plot. It was screened from the road by the dense greenery of a row of ancient mango trees. Craig parked the Land-Rover under one of the mango trees, and led her deeper into an unkempt jungle of bougainvillaea and acacia trees, until she stopped abruptly and exclaimed. "You weren't kidding.

It's a real yacht." "They don't come any realer than that," Craig agreed proudly. "Livranos-designed, forty-five feet overall length, and every plank laid by my own lily-whites." "Craig, she's beautiful!"

"She will be one day when I finish her." The vessel stood on a wooden cradle, with baulks of timber chocking the sides. The deep keel and ocean-going hull lifted the stainless steel deck-railings fifteen feet above Janine's head as she ran forward eagerly.

"How do I get up?" "There is a ladder round the other side." She scrambled up onto the deck, and called down. "What is her name?" "She hasn't got one yet." He climbed up into the cockpit beside her. "When will you launch her, Craig?? ""The good Lord knows," he smiled. "There is a mountain of work to be done on her yet, and every time I run out of money, everything comes to a grinding halt." He was unlocking the hatch as he spoke, and the moment he swung it open Janine ducked down the companionway. "It's cosy down here." "This is where I live." He climbed down into the saloon after her and dropped his kit bag on the deck. "I've finished her off below decks, the galley is through there. Two cabins each with double bunks, a shower and a chemical toilet." "It's beautiful," Janine repeated, running her fingers over the varnished teak joinery, and then bouncing experimentally on the couches.

"Beats paying rent, "he agreed. "What remains to be done?" "Not much– engine, winches, rigging, sails, only about twenty thousand dollars" worth. However, I have just soaked Bawu for almost half of that." He lit the gas refrigerator and then selected a tape and put it on the player.

Janine listened to the liquid purling piano for a few moments and then said, "Ludwig van B of course?" "Of course, who else?" Then with slightly less assurance, she said, "The Path& tique Sonata?" "Oh, very good." He grinned as he found a bottle of Zonnebloem Riesling in one of the cupboards, "and the artiste?" "Oh, come on!" "Give it a shot."

"Kentner?" "Not bad, but it's Pressler." She pulled a face to show her mortification, and he drew the cork and half filled the glasses with pale golden wine.

"Here's looking at you, kid." She sipped and murmured, "Mmm!

That's good." "Dinner!" Craig dived back into the cupboard. "Rice and canned stuff. The potatoes and onions are three months old, growing sprouts already." "Macrobiotic" she said. "Good for you. Can I help?"

They worked happily shoulder to shoulder in the tiny galley, and every time they moved they brushed against each other. She smelled of scented soap, and when he looked down on top of her head, her curly hair was so dense and lustrous that he had an almost uncontrollable urge to bury his face in it. Instead he went to look for another bottle of wine.

He emptied four assorted cans into the pot, chopped onions and potatoes over the mixture and spooned in curry powder. He served it on a bed of rice.

"Delicious,"Janine declared. "What do you call it?" "Don't ask embarrassing questions." "When you launch her, where will you sail her?" Craig reached over her head and brought down a chart and an Indian Ocean Pilot from the bookshelves.

"All right." He pointed out a position on the chart. "Here we are anchored in a secluded little cove on an island in the Seychelles. If you look out the porthole you will see the palm trees and the beaches whiter than sugar. Under us the water is so clear that we seem to be floating in air.".

Janine looked out of the porthole. "You know what you are right! There are the palm trees and I can hear guitars." When they finished eating they pushed the dishes aside, and pored over the books and charts.

"Where next? How about the Greek islands?" "Too touristy." She shook her head. "Australia and the Barrier Reef?" "Beauty!" She mimicked an Aussie accent. "Can I go topless, sport?" "Bottomless too, if you want." "Rude boy." The wine had flushed her cheeks, and put a sparkle in her eyes. She slapped his cheek lightly, and he knew he could kiss her then but before he moved, she said, "Roland told me you were a dreamer."

The name stopped him dead. He felt the coldness in his chest, and suddenly he was angry with her for spoiling the mood of the moment. He wanted to hurt her as she had just hurt him.

"Are you sleeping with him?" he asked, and she swayed back and stared at him with shock. Then her eyes slanted like those of a cat, and the rims of her nostrils turned bone white with fury.

"What did you say?" His own perversity would not let him turn back from the precipice, and he stepped out over it.

"I asked if you were sleeping with him." "Are you sure you want to know?" "Yes." "All right, the answer is "yes", and it's bloody marvelous. Okay?" "Okay,"he said miserably.

"Now you can take me home, please." They drove in complete silence except for her terse directions, and when he parked outside the three-storey block of apartments, he noticed that they were called Beau Vallon, the same as the Seychelles beach over which they had fantasized.

She climbed out of the Land-Rover. "I'm grateful for the lift," she said, and walked up the paved path towards the entrance of the building.

Before she reached it, she turned and came back. "Do you know that you are a spoilt little boy?" she asked. "And that you give up on everything, just like you did on the tennis court." This time she disappeared into the entrance of the building without looking back.

When he got back to the yacht, Craig put the charts and books away, then he cleaned the dishes, dried them, and stacked them in their racks. He thought he had left a bottle of gin in one of the cupboards, but he couldn't find it. There wasn't even any of the wine left. He sat in the saloon with the gaslight hissing softly over his head, and he felt numb and empty. There was no point in going to his bunk. He knew he would not sleep.

He unlaced the kit bag the leather-bound journal that Jonathan had loaned him was on top. He opened it and began to read. It had been written in 1860. The writer was Zouga Ballantyne, Craig's great-great-grandfather.

After a while, Craig no longer felt numb and empty, for he was on the quarterdeck of a tall ship, running southwards down the green Atlantic towards a savage enchanted continent.

Samson Kumalo stood in the centre of the dusty track and watched Craig's beaten-up old Land-Rover growl away up the avenue of spathodea trees. When it took the turn past the old cemetery and disappeared, he picked up his bag and opened the garden gate of the staff cottage. He walked around the side of the building, and stopped below the back porch.

His grandfather, Gideon Kumalo, sat on a straight-backed kitchen chair. The walking-stick, carved like a twisted serpent, was propped between his feet and both his hands rested on the head. He was asleep, sitting upright in the uncomfortable chair in the blaze of the white sunlight.

"It is the only way I can get warm, "he had told Samson. His hair was white and fluffy as cotton wool, the little goatee beard on the tip of his chin trembled with each gentle snore of his breathing. His skin seemed so thin and delicate, that it might tear like ancient parchment, and it was the same very dark amber colour. The network of wrinkles that covered it was cruelly exposed by the direct glare of the sun.

Careful not to block the old man's sunlight, Samson climbed the steps, set his bag aside and sat on the half-wall in front of him. He studied his face, and felt again that gentle suffocating feeling of love. it was more than the duty that any Matabele boy was taught to show to his elders, it went beyond the conventions of parental affection, for between the two of them was an almost mystical bond.

For almost sixty years Gideon Kumalo had been the assistant headmaster at Khami Mission School. Thousands of young Matabele boys and girls had grown up under his guidance, but none had been as special to him as his own grandson.

Suddenly the old man started and opened his eyes. They were milky-blue and sightless as those of a newborn puppy. He tilted his head at a blind listening angle. Samson held his breath and sat motionless, fearful that Gideon might have at last lost the sense of perception which was almost miraculous. The old man turned his head slowly the other way, and listened again. Samson saw his nostrils flare slightly as he sniffed the air.

"Is it you?" he asked in a rusty voice, like the squeak of an un oiled hinge. "Yes, it is you, Vundla." The hare has always played a prominent place in African folklore, the original of the legend of Br'er Rabbit that the slaves took to America with them. Gideon had nicknamed Samson after the lively clever little animal. "Yes, it is you, my little Hare!" "Babo!" Samson let his breath out and went down on one knee before him. Gideon groped for his head and caressed it.

"You have never been away," he said. "For you live always in my heart." Samson thought he might choke if he tried to speak. Silently he reached and took the thin fragile hands and held them to his lips.

"We should have a little tea," Gideon murmured. "You are the only one who can make it to my taste." The old man had a sweet tooth, and Samson placed six heaped teaspoons of brown sugar into the enamel mug before he poured the brew from the blackened tin kettle into it.

Gideon cupped his hands around the mug, sipped noisily, and then smiled and nodded.

"Now tell me, little Hare, what has happened to you? I feel something in you, an uncertainty, like a man who has lost the path and seeks to find it again." He listened while Samson spoke, sipping and nodding. Then when he finished talking, he said. "It is time you came back to the Mission to teach. You told me once that you could not teach the young people about life until you learned yourself. Have you learned yet?" "I do not know, Babo. What can I teach them? That death stalks the land, that life is as cheap as a single bullet?" "Will you always live with doubts, my dear grandson, must you always look for the questions that have no answers! If a man doubts everything, then he will attempt nothing. The strong men of this world are the ones who are always certain of their own rightness." "Then perhaps I wIill never be strong, Grandfather." They finished the pot of tea and Samson brewed another. Even the melancholy of their conversation could not dim their pleasure in each other, and they basked in it until at last Gideon asked. "What time is it?" "Past four o'clock." "Constance will be off duty at five. Will you go down to the hospital to meet her?"

Samson changed into jeans and a light blue shirt, and left the old man on the porch. He went down the hill. At the gate of the high security fence that enclosed the hospital, he submitted to the body-search by the uniformed guards, and then went up past the post-operative wards, outside which the convalescent patients in blue dressing gowns sat on the lawn in the sunlight. Many of them had limbs missing, for the Khami Hospital received many of the victims of land-mine explosion and other war injuries. All the patients were black. Khami Hospital was graded as African only.

At the reception desk in the main entrance hall, the two little Matabele nurses recognized him and chittered like sparrows with pleasure. Gently Samson tapped them. for the current gossip of the Mission Station, the marriages and births, the deaths and courtships of this close-knit little community. He was interrupted by a. sharp authoritative voice.

"Samson, Samson Kumalo!" and he turned to see the hospital superintendent striding purposefully down the wide corridor towards him.

Doctor Leila St. John wore a white laboratory-coat with a row of ballpoint pens in the top pocket, and a stethoscope dangling from her neck. Under the open coat was a shapeless maroon sweater "and a long skirt of crumpled Indian cotton in a gaudy ethnic design. Her feet were in thick green men's socks, and open sandals which buckled at the side. Her dark hair was stringy and lank, tied with leather thongs into two tails that stuck out on each side of her head above her prominent ears.

Her skin was unnaturally pale, inherited from her father, Robert St. John. It was pock-marked with the cicatrices of ancient acne. Her horned-rimmed spectacles were square and mannish, and a cigarette dangled from the corner of her wide thin lips. She had a prim, serious old-fashioned face, but the gaze of her green eyes was direct and intense as she stopped in front of Samson and took his hand firmly.

"So the prodigal returns to run off with one of my best theatre sisters, I have no doubt." "Good evening, Doctor Leila." "Are you still playing "boy" to your white settler?" she demanded. Leila St. John had spent five years in detention in Gwelo political prison at the pleasure of the Rhodesian government. She had been there at the same time as Robert Mugabe who, from exile, now led the ZANU wing of the liberation army.

"Craig Mellow is a third-generation Rhodesian on both sides of his family. He is also my friend. He is not a settler." "Samson, you are an educated and highly capable man.

All around you the world is melting in the crucible of change, history is being forged on the anvil of war. Are you content to waste the talents that God gave you and let other lesser men snatch the future from you?" "I do not like war, Doctor Leila. Your father made me a Christian." "Only mad men do, but what other way is there to destroy the insensate violence of the capitalist imperialist system?

What other way to meet the noble and legitimate aspirations of the poor, the weak and the politically oppressed?" Samson glanced swiftly around the entrance hall, and she smiled.

"Don't worry, Samson. You are amongst friends here. True friends." Leila St. John glanced at her wristwatch. "I must go. I will tell Constance to bring you to dinner. We will talk again." She turned abruptly away, and the heels of her scuffed brown sandals clacked on the tiled floor as she hurried towards the double swing doors marked "OutPatients."

Samson found a seat on one of the long benches outside these doors, and waited amongst the sick and lame, the coughing and sniffing, the bandaged and the bleeding. The sharp antiseptic smell of the hospital seemed to permeate his clothes and skin.

Constance came at last. One of the nurses must have warned her, for her head turned eagerly from side to side "and her dark eyes shone excitedly as she searched for him. He savoured the pleasure of seeing her for a moment or two longer before standing up from his seat on the bench.

Her uniform was crisply starched and ironed, the white apron stark upon the pink candy stripes, and her cap was perched at a jaunty angle.

The badges of her grades theatre sister, midwifery, and the others gleamed on her breast. Her hair was pulled up tightly and plaited into intricate patterns over her scalp, an arrangement which took many patient hours to perfect. Her face was round and smooth as a dark moon, the classical Nguni beauty with huge black eyes and sparkling white teeth in her welcoming smile.

Her back was straight, her shoulders narrow but strong. Her breasts under the white apron were good, her waist narrow and her hips broad and fecund. She moved with that peculiar African grace, as though she danced to music that she alone could hear.

She stopped in front of him. "I see you, Samson," she murmured.

Suddenly shy, she dropped her eyes.

"I see you, my heart," he replied as softly. They did not touch each other, for a display of passion in public was against custom and would have been distasteful to both of them.

They walked slowly up the hill together towards the cottage.

Although she was not a blood relative of Gideon Kumalo, Constance had been one of his favourite students before his failing eyesight drove him into retirement. When his wife died, Constance had gone to live with him, to care for him and keep his house. It was there she had met Samson.

Though she chattered easily enough, relating the small happenings that had taken place in his absence, Samson sensed some reserve in her, and twice she glanced back along the path with something of fear in her eyes.

"What is it that troubles you?" he asked, as they paused at the garden gate.

"How did you know-" she began, and then answered herself. "Of course you know. You know everything about me What is it that troubles you?" " "The "boys" are here," Constance said simply, and Samson felt the chill on his skin so that the goose pimples rose upon his forearms.

The "boys" and the "girls" were the guerrilla fighters of the Zimbabwe revolutionary army.

"Here?" he asked. "Here at the Mission?" She nodded.

"They bring danger and the threat of death upon everybody here," he said bitterly.

"Samson, my heart," she whispered. "I have to tell you. I could shirk my duty no longer. I have-joined them at last. I am one of the "girls" now." They ate the evening meal in the central room of the cottage, which was kitchen, dining-room and sitting-room in one.

In place of a table-cloth, Constance covered the scrubbed deal table with sheets of the Rhodesian Herald newspaper. The columns of newsprint were interspersed with columns of blank paper, the editor's silent protest against the draconian decrees of the government censors.